The Alberta government has dramatically under-reported the number of child welfare deaths over the past decade, undermining public accountability and thwarting efforts at prevention and reform.

Robert DesJarlait's insight:

An article that reveils the underside of foster care. However, it's important not to create generalizations of foster care that all foster children are abused and neglected in foster homes. Certainly there are bad foster homes, but there are also good fosters and foster families as well.

Conventional medical treatments include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, while any other unproven cancer treatment administered by non-medical personnel would be considered an alternative therapy.

Yale School of Medicine's Dr. Skyler Johnson, lead author of the study, said that based on what he's seen as a practicing doctor, patients are increasingly refusing or delaying conventional cancer treatment in favor of alternative therapies.

As a result of that, their cancer is "advancing: either getting larger or spreading to lymph nodes or spreading to distant sites," Johnson said. "This is concerning, because your chance of cure decreases as the cancer grows and spreads."

Members of the American Indian Caucus in the Montana Legislature called for the removal of a Confederate memorial in Helena. “Today, we must recognize the fact that the Confederacy and its symbolism has stood for segregation, secession, and slavery,” said a letter from state lawmakers Rep. Shane Morigeau, D-Missoula; Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Rocky Boy; Rep. Bridget Smith, D-Wolf Point; Rep. George Kipp III, D-Heart Butte; Rep. Susan Webber, D-Browning; Rep. Sharon Stewart-Peregoy, D-Crow Agency; Rep. Rae Peppers, D-Lame Deer, and Sen. Jason Small, R-Busby. “The Confederate flag was even used by the Dixiecrats, a segregationist political party of the 1940s. The flag continues to serve as an emblem for racism and racial inequality for domestic terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other white nationalist organizations.”

The challenges of processing hemp have tribal officials cautious about the payoff from hemp, but they envision making construction materials and creating much needed jobs.

"If you can integrate the hemp industry along with the building industry, mankind is always building," said Douglas Lee, a student at the White Earth tribal college who's helping create a hemp industry economic development plan. "That's one thing that's never going to run out is building material."

Hemp also fits well with the White Earth Nation vision for sustainable food production, said food sovereignty coordinator Paige. These hemp plots have had no added fertilizer or pesticides so it would fit well with an organic crop rotation.

"Edible beans, native corn, hemp, alfalfa. This kind of rotation is an organic rotation that would be profitable in a value added market," said Paige.

Promoters of this all-natural cure can’t agree on one name for it — amygdalin, laetrile, Laetrile with a capital L, B17? Nor do they agree on how much to take and how often. Nor is there a way to ensure that the many seeds, pills, powders, and liquids in which it can take form are chemically consistent. All these variables make it hard to study its supposedly wondrous effects.

A 2015 review looked at the available studies of laetrile and amygdalin in humans and found “no reliable evidence” that they could cure cancer. On the whole, it concluded, the chances of bad side effects made the risks “unambiguously negative.”

In 1982, the Mayo Clinic put 178 cancer patients on laetrile, enzymes, vitamins, and a restricted diet, a regimen based on several laetrile doctors’ recommendations. When it came to getting cured, seeing their symptoms improve or disease stabilize, or living longer, they didn’t substantially improve. On average, they survived less than five months after starting treatment.

“I do remember some of the patients wanting it to be continued, believing it was working even though their tumor had clearly grown, they had gotten weaker and clearly more sick,” said Gregory Sarna, a study co-author who was a UCLA oncologist at the time. “That did not dissuade some of them from their belief that it was working.”

The Native American protesters have only asked that the Walker and the show’s subsequent venues (the Whitney in New York and the Remai Modern in Saskatoon) make clear in their didactics and publications that Durham is not a Cherokee. However, the artworld must go further, asking ourselves what the stakes are of promoting Durham’s work when so few American Indian artists are shown in mainstream U.S. museums. To what extent has Durham’s success been predicated on his talent as a trickster, and to what extent has it depended on what artists, critics, art institutions, and art audiences value? Are our critical assumptions leading to a situation where the only good Indian (artist) is a fake Indian (artist)? What are our collective “sweet spots”?

Numerous non-Native people have tried to say, “Indigenous identity is complex,” as if that ends the conversation. It’s complex, but not incomprehensible. There are non-enrolled descendants of many tribal communities who still engage with and contribute to those communities. That is not Durham’s case. He is not a member of any of the three Cherokee tribes—the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Cherokee Nation. The tribes, not the federal government, decide who is eligible to be a member. Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, any of them can designate anyone they want as a tribal artisan. None has chosen to designate Durham to represent them in the art world.

Durham has no Cherokee ancestors, does not live in a Cherokee community, does not belong to a Cherokee ceremonial ground, and has not married into a Cherokee family. The situation could not be clearer. Yes, Jimmie Durham was part of the American Indian Movement, but so was Marlon Brando.

Murkowski said she was dismayed by the agency’s recent track record, particularly after she helped steer an extra $29 million in this year’s budget to address quality of care problems at three of its hospitals in the Midwest.

“I believe the agency is sincere in its desire to fix these problems,” she said, “but a year later­ these problems remain and appear to be more serious than ever.”

Whenever racial fantasies get loose, “race pimps” slip into politics—but only the non-white race pimps catch hell. The white race pimps are clothed in an impenetrable armor of normalcy. When white race pimps act to protect the status quo, they are not change agents and therefore not threatening.

Indian identity is in a class by itself because so many Indian children have been stolen and raised without their culture, a culture that was, without exception, non-Christian before Columbus. Unless you are a fundamentalist Mormon, in which case Jesus Christ appeared here before the Middle East and people on this continent rode around on magic horses that left no trace in the fossil record.

In the 21st century, Indian identity among the settlers is all stereotype all the time. Race pimps abound, box-checking for fun and profit.

When a full blood may not be carrying indigenous culture, how do you make a principled decision about a box checker? How do you distinguish an Indian who has had the Indian in him killed to save him as a man from a card-carrying citizen of the Wanabi Nation?

The idea of recognizing the rights of nature is anchored in Indigenous philosophies, and the new laws are the fruit of lasting, intense pressure from Indigenous Peoples and their allies. Yet if the rights of nature give a “voice” to Indigenous worldviews, they also reinforce state control. And the two may not be easily reconcilable.

On one side, capitalist solutions like carbon markets create financial rewards for protecting nature. On the other side, the rights of nature create a legal façade that appeases, if momentarily, claims for self-determination from indigenous and environmental groups.

﻿ Even the racism that was on full display in Trump’s campaign should be understood at least in part in retaliatory terms, as directed at the political elite rather than at struggling minority groups. The Hells Angels, Thompson wrote, did things like get tattoos of swastikas mostly because it visibly scared the members of polite society. The Angels were perfectly happy to hang out at bars with men of different races, especially if those men drove motorcycles, and several insisted to Thompson that the racism was only for show. While I have no doubt (and no one should have any doubt) that there are genuine racists in Trump’s constituency—and the gleeful performance of racism is nothing to shrug off—Thompson suggests we should consider the ways in which racism might not be the core disease of Trumpism but a symptom of a deeper illness.

No matter what metric is used to determine Indigenous status, Durham does not fulfill any of them. Jimmie Durham is not a Cherokee in any legal or cultural sense. This not a small matter of paperwork but a fundamental matter of tribal self-determination and self-governance. Durham has no Cherokee relatives; he does not live in or spend time in Cherokee communities; he does not participate in dances and does not belong to a ceremonial ground.

Some worry that the presence of pot at a powwow will encourage drug experimentation. Vaughan Rees, the director of the Center for Global Tobacco Control at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that UltraHealth is pulling marketing tactics from the big tobacco playbook. “They’re integrating their branding into the Native American community, and they’re promoting the idea that these products are safe, and something that everybody does, and that changes social norms,” Rees says. “That makes the job of the people whose mission to reduce the introduction of drugs or other potentially risky behavior more difficult.”

Rees says that this is the most explicit example he’s seen to date of the marijuana industry advertising to a specific racial or ethnic population. It is something, he anticipates, that will continue. “These are the battles we’re going to have to fight as the cannabis industry spreads its tentacles,” he says. “It just makes me sick.”

Theda Newbreast, a board member for the Native Wellness Institute from the Blackfeet reservation, also sees parallels to the tactics of tobacco and other industries. “The beer companies used to bring candies wrapped in their logos to our reservations and pass them out to kids, and the tobacco companies tossed out candy cigarettes at our parades,” she says “I worry that a 10-year-old who is on the fence might get curious and now feel okay to try it.”

Robert DesJarlait's insight:

The colonization never ends. Non-Native enterprisers looking for a door to bring capitalism into Indian Country. And who will really get the profits? And who will suffer? How would the legalization of pot on reservations affect our children? The drug scourge has penetrated deep into our communities. How do we create wellness when dysfunctions flourish in broken families? And what of the cultural connections of dance? Because this isn't about dancing for the people. It's about dancing for the money - and in this case, drug money. And, of course, there will be dancers and singers who won't care. Because for them, it's all about the money and who places first.

I know I did good things in my work with Indigenous communities, but I am now acutely aware of that which I did not know then. In my quest to “be the voice,” I had hogged the microphone in moments when I should have shut up and listened. I don’t know what reconciliation will look like, but it will sound like authentic Indigenous voices being listened to and respected by non-Indigenous ears.

The Boyden debate has brought up a lot of these emotions for me. I love the greater Indigenous community. And I have felt loved in return by them. But that love means respecting them and their rights too much to masquerade as one of them or attempt to dilute their strength of claim with my own rather dubious origin.

For instance, women were considered to be especially powerful when giving birth. Their skills in midwifery and healing made them sought after figures in tribal life. Traditional Ojibwe teaching stories describe Nokomis’s (grandmother) special power and knowledge of healing plants that were invaluable to the community.

Child further notes that in traditional Ojibwe society, men did not gain the right to direct a woman’s life or resources after marriage. “Women continuously worked and otherwise interacted with relatives and the roles of daughter, sister, mother and aunt were important mantles of responsibility,” she writes.

Child also describes the crucial role that Ojibwe women played in negotiating treaties and relationships with European settlers.

“Ojibwe ideas about property were not invested in patriarchy as in European traditions,” she observes.

By not embracing and celebrating the Native American legacy in lacrosse, we are going to lose the “deep roots” that can keep all of us grounded. These roots, at the same time, heal us and keep us spiritually, mentally and emotionally healthy.

The damage, some of which can't be erased, amounts to a significant loss for both Canadian and Indigenous cultures, she said.

"We are talking about Indigenous heritage, oral traditions, cultural memory," Zawadzka said. "The sites are associated with sacred places, traditional territories, and traditional knowledge. They are living sites."

The Indian Reorganization Act became law in 1934, during the 73rd Congress. Section 5 of the IRA authorized the land-into-trust process as a means to restore lands that tribes lost during the disastrous allotment era. Between 1887 and 1934, tribes lost ownership of 90 million acres as a result of the policy. Since 1934, only about 7 million acres has been restored through the land-into-trust process and other initiatives like the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations. But Francis pointed out that tribes once controlled a lot more territory. Those lands were lost through land cessions in treaties, fraudulent sales and outright theft and force. "In 1491, all 2.3 billion acres of what would become the United States was Indian Country," Francis said.

The IHS and tribal health advocates say Congress underfunds the agency, and the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposes cutting about $300 million, a roughly 6% decrease from its 2017 level.

The IHS spent $3,688 on care for the average patient in 2015, according to an agency document. The Veterans Health Administration, for comparison, spent an average of $11,056 on medical services for each veteran receiving VA health care in 2015, that agency’s records show. The two agencies count the users of their services differently, and their populations vary.

Activists say thousands of protesters will descend on Minnesota should the state OK a permit to let Enbridge Energy replace an aging oil pipeline. State officials and company executives are working to head off a confrontation.

But Windigo is back. It never really left. It’s only that our stories have been interrupted by the theft of our languages, kinship, and fires. Windigo lives inside the black robes of residential schools, in the broken treaties, and behind genocidal institutions whose extractivist culture dominates Anishnaabek lives and lands. Upheld through racist policies like the Indian Act, Canada maintains space for Windigo to thrive and feed on the land, the water, and the people. Through stolen land and lives, Canada’s Windigo society has built its empire on a trail of death and destruction.

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